Quote Originally Posted by Puss_Kat View Post
the issue really has nothing to do with what windows is doing with the audio, or the driver for that matter, its all a performance issue / lack of engine optimization where more Sounds are being rendered than should be causing a process bottleneck where graphics and audio are competing for cpu time.
Sure, but if there's no software resampling on the CPU, and the soundcard is matching the source samplerate, then the CPU does very little and there should be no/less stuttering. I imagine that's why I got it working in Linux with alsa (exclusive mode), and not the software resampling Pulseaudio.

I mean, it *could* be other reasons too, like CPU scheduler is better optimised on Linux, but then that wouldn't explain how switching to ALSA fixes it.

Regardless, if FFXIV doesn't allow exclusive control of the soundcard, there's no way to verify.